Computer technology has and continues to have a dramatic impact on all aspects of the human experience. For example, much of the new technology in the computer field defies definition using conventional terminology, and as a result, new words, terms, and phrases are added to the public's lexicon every day. Whereas the term “e-mail” meant something to only a few people only 10 years ago, today the term is practically as ubiquitous as the term “fire.”
Furthermore, the advent of public networks such as the Internet have made it substantially easier for people to communicate with other people all over the world, as well as to access a wide variety of information from other computers located all over the world. One particularly interesting side effect of the Internet's bringing together of people from across the globe is the sweeping cultural changes that are beginning to occur. People with vastly different backgrounds, cultures, native languages, and the like are able to communicate electronically with one another with relative ease despite the fact that those people are located in different states, different countries or even different continents. As a result, people are exposed to new cultures, languages, and experiences that otherwise they might not experience outside of the electronic realm.
The world is consequently in the midst of a renaissance of culture and language, with the public's lexicon constantly in a state of flux. As new linguistic terms spring up and old terms cease to be used, it becomes difficult, particularly for writers and authors, and even for those corresponding informally with others by electronic messaging, to ensure the proper usage of terms in their compositions. Adding the fact that the informal nature of many electronic communications often diminishes one's desire to carefully and properly use terminology, the ability to ensure the proper spellings and usages of linguistic terms becomes even more difficult.
Automated spell checkers have been around for a number of years, and are used by a number of computer applications, including word processors, electronic messaging applications, desktop publishing applications, etc. Automated spell checkers generally operate by comparing words in a document against an electronic dictionary of terms, and identifying words that are not found in the dictionary as potential misspellings. Users often are permitted to customize their dictionaries by manually adding new terms.
However, the utility of an automated spell checker is often limited somewhat where technical terms, or other terms of art, are present in a document. Legal or scientific documents may contain a significant number of terms that are not found in common dictionaries. Some field-specific dictionaries have been made available to users that frequently author in a certain field. Otherwise, users that frequently use uncommon terms are generally required to manually add those terms to dictionaries over time to incorporate those terms into their spell checker's “vocabulary.”
Considering the rapid influx of new terms brought about by the Internet and technology in general, however, maintaining spell checkers current is an arduous task. Electronic dictionaries are generally not updated particularly frequently, and users may not be particularly aggressive in adding new terms to a custom dictionary.
Perhaps more importantly, users may not be sure of what the proper spelling or punctuation for a linguistic term should be. For some terms, in fact, there may not even be a single spelling or punctuation of a term that is generally regarded as the “correct” usage of that term. For example, is “e-mail” spelled with or without a dash? Should the term “data warehousing” have a hyphen?
Similar problems may also exist for company names (is the “com” in a dot-com company's name capitalized?), as well as slang expressions (is “cheese head” one word or two?). Moreover, acronyms may stand for different things (e.g., “DVD” has been considered by different people to stand for either “digital video disk” or “digital versatile disk”).
From the standpoint of an author or writer (or even the casual e-mail user), it would be extremely beneficial to be able to determine the proper (or most appropriate) spelling, punctuation, meaning and/or usage of linguistic terms, particularly newly-coined terms. Whether or not that person used such knowledge to update a dictionary, or simply to improve the quality of his or her writings, the benefits of obtaining such knowledge would be significant.